Metallica Monday

So my week kicked off with a big bang. Literally. My BF took me to the Metallica concert on Monday. The first time I've seen them live and wow. Had to be one of the best rock concerts I've ever seen. Our seats were great!  Check out some of the photos (keep in mind the quality is crap - from my camera phone).

As for their set - the first few songs were from their latest album Death Magnetic. Although I'm not familiar with those tunes - very impressive.  From there, they went to a few fan favorites with Seek & Destroy and One. Then the fever-pitch rose with  Enter Sandman and Unforgiven. I have to say the highlight for me was hearing the epic Master of Puppets. If there's one song that defines this band (if that's possible), I think it's MoP. It was the showstopper that brought the crowd to a frenzy.


I'll be checking-in later this week with a new rant on the environment.

Until then, here's a very clever animated short for your viewing pleasure.

Binge and Purge

Shaken, not stirred

So it's blog action day. The subject this year ? Climate Change.

First and last, the purpose of Blog Action Day is to create a discussion. We ask bloggers to take a single day out of their schedule and focus it on an important issue.

I took a geology course in college that was dubbed 'rocks for jocks' because it was considered an easy credit. While I enjoyed the plate tectonics as such, it was learning about past climates that tweaked my interest on the subject. Climate Change, formerly known as Global Warming, is the latest media vernacular when reporting on all things green.

I find fear is the number one tactic used by environmental brain-trusts when trying to get their message across. If we don't do X now, we'll get Y later than eventually Z. (Oooh not Z). And Y not. Fear motivates a lot of human behavior - fear of failure - fear of dying - fear of flying - fear of work. I personally fear hummus. When someone puts a bowl of that stuff in front of me I have to leave the room. It's scary. I shudder just thinking about it. Fear as a tactic to fight Climate Change is one dimensional. Actionable yes but educational no. You don't conquer fears by not understanding them. (I'm getting therapy for the hummus btw).

How does one conquer climate change exactly ? Don a toque when it's cold?

As we look to take action on Blog Action Day - let's try something other than fear as the motivator for change.

So here's my offering. Climate Change for Christina is 2 fold. The first knowing Climate Change is about the earth's natural evolution over time. You know as we orbit around the sun, stuff happens, ummm, like the southern continents get warmer, I think, umm, yup they do this time of year cause, yah know, they're closer to the sun. Over longer periods of time, the earth's climate has a tendency to change drastically.

The second fold of Climate Change for Christina is mankind. Our nature as survivor & species taking up more of earth's real-estate as each year passes. Our ability to reproduce, adapt and evolve (ha ha) to the ever changing climate makes for some bad-ass mammals.

Making sense of the fact that population growth continues while the earth remains the same size is for the scientists to figure out. They've got a pretty good idea now. Yet it's increasingly become more complex and a problem we need to address sooner rather than later. So they say. Thus Climate Change as the subject de jour - and taking better care of the environment - the action. The solution is complex - improving how we re-produce renewable non-carbon-emitting-energy products for the masses.

Quiz Time

Q: What generates emission free electricity, cools our nuclear tubes and makes for a refreshing beverage? Oil? no. Coal? no. Cow poop? No.

A: For Aqua. In the great white north, we have an abundance of the most important resource of all things life on the planet. The majority of Canada’s power production (just under 60%) comes from hydroelectricity. In Ontario, Nuclear and Hydro combined represent 75% of power production – all of which is non carbon emitting. (*Source: laforet.ca)

I'll leave this post with a question.

Q: If our greatest natural resource is the key to human survival, the planet's well being & provider of clean energy. Why we talkin' bout 'clean coal', building wind farms and solar panels when we're ignoring what's got us this far ?


A: (Fill in the blank comment form)

To: Humans, From: Everything Else on the Planet -- Thanks a lot

Four billion years. That's how long the Earth has been around. In that period of time, the ecosystem has gone through roughly five of what are being called "mass extinction periods", which is exactly what it sounds like: everything dies. Now, scientists are suggesting we're heading into period #6, but this time there's a catalyst that has nothing to do with giant space rocks or volcanoes or God turning down the thermostat -- take a wild guess what that catalyst might be.

It's okay, I'll wait.

Still guessing? Here's a hint. It's us.

At this point, the appearance and propagation of existing species is being rapidly outmatched by species that are vanishing, literally every day. And it's all our fault. To illustrate, here's a great quote from David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley:

"There's no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now...[A]mphibians have been around for about 250 million years. They made it through when the dinosaurs didn't. The fact that they're cutting out now should be a lesson for us."

So whatever it was that killed off the dinosaurs, we're worse. Anybody really surprised? Show of hands?

Here are some more fun facts: according to the 10,000 or so scientists who work for the World Conservation Union, 51 per cent of known reptiles, 52 per cent of known insects, and 73 per cent of known flowering plants are in danger, along with a metric ton of mammals, birds and amphibians. Not enough? We are killing off species we don't even know exist yet. Remember all those warnings we got back in the early 90's about how we could potentially steamroll over the cure for cancer or AIDS and not even know it? Yeah, welcome to the new millennium, where science fiction has become science fact.

Let's take it even a step farther, and you can take this one with a grain of salt because it's a little apocalyptic even for my new-found worldview, but check this out. Straight from the mouth of Peter Raven, past President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

"We have driven the rate of biological extinction, the permanent loss of species, up several hundred times beyond its historical levels, and are threatened with the loss of a majority of all species by the end of the 21st century."

Several hundred times. Roll that number around in your head for a minute. We have cell phones more powerful than the personal computers of ten years ago; we can text one another from New Zealand to Toronto in the blink of an eye; we have iPods and Blackberries and automatic everything and five cars a household and sex toys designed by NASA -- and even with all this human ingenuity at work, we can't seem to stop killing everything.

It's like the author of the article says: what good are all these conveniences if we manage to rape, pillage, burn and destroy our natural environment, and essentially murder ourselves in slow motion in the process?

It's time for a serious alteration of our priorities. Like, now. Right now. I'm not kidding.

Check it out.

Site redesign; new vision

Hello fellow environmentalists.

By now you've noticed the site redesign which I completed scant minutes ago, and I bet you're wondering what the heck happened. That's a fair question -- it's a pretty severe redesign, and it probably shocked some people because it's a radical departure from how my blog has been run up until today.

I spent this morning reading back through the posts since I started here on Blogger, and it quickly became apparent to me that something has been missing. What do we call that elusive element that makes a blog successful?

Oh, right. Readership.

I have spent most of my adult life campaigning for environmental awareness because I genuinely care about our planet. I want nothing more than to see us get back on the right track, to find balance and harmony with our ecosystem, to fix the glaring errors of the past and develop new strategies to benefit our world and ourselves. To that end I've tried to provide helpful, positive commentary on new innovations in environmental science and useful tips on how to green up your personal life. I have done this because I truly believe in basic human goodness and the capacity to change our attitudes and way of life for the better.

And nobody seems to be listening.

Every day I scan the environmental news diggs, searching for articles highlighting positive, forward thinking motion towards realistic, eco-friendly change. But all too often the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be an oncoming train -- a train fueled by ignorance, by short-sightedness, and most especially by an overriding sense of apathy towards these issues. I know there are people who care as much as I do out there, but we seem to be in the minority. People are far more concerned with comfort and short-term security than they are with influencing government and industry to put on the brakes before we go careening off the cliff towards which we're driving with reckless abandon. And frankly, I've had it.

So from now on you're going to get something very different from the Blog Formerly Known As Green Me Up. I'm not pulling punches anymore. If I see lies, I'm calling them lies. If I see inconsistency, I'm going to shore it up. And if I see hypocrisy, complacency or apathy, I'm going to nail it to a wall.

I haven't lost hope. I still believe in a green future. It's just time for me to take a more aggressive stance. Eco-warriors, unite! We're going to get this train back on track if we have to get out and push.

Apocalyptica

Normally I'm a bright, sunshiny person, and even though I'm well aware of the potential dangers our race faces if we keep ruining our planet, I don't usually buy into the doomsayers who predict the end of the world as we know it. I like to think positively and work proactively, but sometimes it's hard to look away when somebody is holding up the big cardboard sign stating The End Is Nigh. And this article, in particular, struck me because I'll admit to having kind of a dark sense of humour at times, and this guy was kind of funny even as he was sounding the death knell of our culture.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, predicts that if climate change continues undeterred, we could see massive worldwide disaster on a scale heretofore unseen in human history. Even a nine-degree (Fahrenheit) raise in global temperature, a conservative estimate based on studies, would result in disruption of the monsoon, collapse of the Amazon rain forest and the meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, not to mention deoxygenation of huge tracts of the world's oceans (which would prove devastating to marine life and the ecosystem in general). Based on these apocalyptic findings, Dr. Schellnhuber predicts the death of over 75% of the human population, bringing our total numbers down to a more ecologically supportable 1 billion inhabitants.

On the bright side, he told the Danish hosts of the recent climate meeting in Copenhagen, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet would "increase your usable land by, I don't know, 10,000 percent." Funny guy.

This is scary stuff. Remember, I said conservative estimates, which means Dr. Schellnhuber's calculations are a better-case scenario. It could be much, much worse. How many signs to we have to wave around before governments, institutions and individuals start taking this issue seriously? This isn't a John Wyndham novel, folks, this is real life. Wake up.

Here's the full article.

What was once Helpful may now be Harmful

Source: Jeff and Annabel of Digging_for_Fire (Creative Commons License)

This news article comes from the Chicago Tribune and highlights the unfortunate turn of events affecting Canada's vast forests. Once touted as "carbon storage sink", our forests have in recent years experienced so much stress that it has caused them to begin to emit carbon rather than store it. This quote from the article sums it up well:

Earth's lungs have come down with emphysema. Canada's forests are no longer our friends.

It is unfortunate but environmentalists cite that logging should be cut back in order to stem any further carbon emissions (or worse, "carbon bombs"). Government scientists contradict this, stating that reducing logging would cause wood-dependent products to be constructed with the much more environmentally damaging production materials such as concrete, plastic or metals. Both parties have valid points however I would really like to look at what we can do to heal our forests. I hope to see a followup of this article soon, I'll try to keep everyone posted!

Interesting Article Alert: Why Disasters Are Getting Worse

Just doing my usual morning perusal of articles and I believed this one from Time Magazine looked worthy of a blog post! At first I was confused and I believed the article was trying to bring attention away from the climate change issue however I quickly realized that these disasters were still affected by human development paving over natural barriers to natural disasters. Here's a choice quote to get you intrigued!

If climate change is having an effect on the intensities of storms, it's not obvious in the historical weather data. And whatever effect it is having is much, much smaller than the effect of development along coastlines. In fact, if you look at all storms from 1900 to 2005 and imagine today's populations on the coasts, as Roger Pielke Jr., and his colleagues did in a 2008 Natural Hazards Review paper, you would see that the worst hurricane would have actually happened in 1926.

If it happened today, the Great Miami storm would have caused from $140 billion to $157 billion in damages. (Hurricane Katrina, the costliest storm in U.S. history, caused $100 billion in losses.) "There has been no trend in the number or intensity of storms at landfall since 1900," says Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado. "The storms themselves haven't changed."